5 Tips for Managing Social Media for Business

Whether or not social media is right for your business is no longer the question. The real question now is “Which social media platform is right” for your business. While some businesses are content to excel at one platform, many businesses are managing several networks to promote their products and services. To excel at THAT requires a little foresight and planning, and perhaps some useful social media resources. Here are my top five tips for managing multiple social media accounts for your business.

Get a Dashboard

There are many social media management dashboards available on the market. They range in features and monitoring capabilities as well as in price. Hootsuite (aff.) and TweetDeck are two of the most popular ones, the biggest difference being that Hootsuite is cloud based and TweetDeck is a program you download to your hard drive. Both have similar features and pricing, but advocates for each extol the virtues of their respective differences, of course. Click here for additional tips on using a social media dashboard. If you’re not quite ready to jump into a full-service dashboard, check out Buffer an even simpler, but very useful little program.

Make a Schedule

Actually, you’ll probably need to make a couple of different types of schedules. Mark in your calendar the days on which you will do analysis (i.e. check your Google analytics, bit.ly stats, ow.ly stats, Facebook insights and other specialized tools you may use). You’ll also need to make a daily schedule to help you focus your time if you want to keep your social media management to 10-20 minutes per day. Try focusing on one or two tasks per day and don’t let yourself get distracted. For example, one day could be commenting day and the next could be for Twitter follower management.

Use Twitter Lists

Creating your own Twitter lists can really help streamline your reading on Twitter. Make a list that contains the people you want to be sure not to miss. Then you can feel free to follow as many people as you want, only adding who you deem worthy to the “top list”. Make that list private if you don’t want to offend anyone, or publicize who’s in your “top list”. Create lists for your industry, city, competitors and association members. When Twitter is on your schedule it’s now easy to read what is relevant to you. Don’t forget to check out the lists that others have created and subscribe to the great ones to save time in creating your own.

Find Relevant Guest Bloggers

If blogging is your nemesis, contact some other local bloggers to see if they would like to share posts. I have shared posts from Blue Boat Social Marketing, Daley Progress and Bate Media. Each of them has great content relevant to my audience and I like to promote other complementary local businesses.

It’s OK to Take a Day Off

Post to Facebook and LinkedIn twice a day. Tweet eight to ten times a day. Update Foursquare, TripAdvisor and Yelp profiles regularly. Blog once a week. Don’t forget about the monthly e-newsletter. What’s that new one called… Pinterest? And for goodness’ sake update your website content. WHEW. That’s a lot of work. Yes, consistency is important in maintaining your social media presence. Nobody is interested in a website that hasn’t been touched since 2009 or a Facebook Timeline that still has last season’s cover photo up, but it’s OK to take a day off. Don’t get your pixels in a pout if you miss out on your scheduled social media time for a day…or two. We’ll forgive you. Honest.

What are your best social media management tips for the business owner? Share them in the comments.